


A Garden Path

by LookingForDroids



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: Causality, Ficlet, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:11:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26310136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Mundanities converge, too small for notice.
Kudos: 8





	A Garden Path

Tonight, the green moon’s eye is masked by cloud, and your mind is tranquil. You rake the garden path into neat spirals, and as you work, you feel the strings of causality shift around you. Some pull taut, or braid together into stronger strands. Others hang loose. Some fray, but none are cut. 

Wind bends the branches, and leaves fall. You let them drift where they will, but every so often, you nudge a pebble into or out of place. None of this has any meaning obvious to the observer, which is necessary, because you are certain you are observed.

.

There’s a boy you know, a goldblood already old at seven sweeps, who keeps a hive lined with monitors and claims the multiverse is code. He says he has radios that pick up the songs of Horrorterrors, and that the end is written in the stars.

He’s wrong. It’s written beyond them, in the convolutions of the Furthest Ring, and closer, in moonlight. On one thing, though, you’re agreed: written can be overwritten. The process of obtaining the right accesses can seem arcane to the uninitiated, though your hacker contacts would call you crazy if you told them they spent their nights casting majyyk spells. That’s OK. You know you’re crazy. You don’t mind. But if the universe is code, and it is, then the position of rocks in a garden and the path taken by water matter as much as the arrangement of any string of ones and zeros. 

.

You step back, observing your finished work.

There’s a friend-shaped blank space you’re not supposed to meet. Doing so will kill you, in five universes of six. This is a matter of probability, not destiny; an unweighted coin may land heads up a thousand times without violating natural law. That doesn’t mean it‘s not also possible to cheat.

Mundanities converge, too small for notice: a new selection of lattes, available tomorrow; a flier advertising a two-for-one deal on certain poisons, left outside the right hive. 

It’s not a permanent design. You’re only setting it up to see what happens next.


End file.
